Hey Gog'ers! I was wondering if anyone knows if it's possible to stream/broadcast (preferrably to Twitch) from a computer that has specs just above the equivalent of a cardboard box. I just started broadcasting via PS4 and had the idea of doing a let's play variant of the old Command & Conquer series, among other games. My hopes are probably in vain, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to ask.

Thanks!

A single question. How many cores/CPU's does it have?

a-one! 2.1ghz I think. :) or 2.3... I'm too ashamed to check. :D

If you had multiple cores you could force one core to do the encoding for the steaming, and one to play games with.

However at 2.1Ghz you should be fine with the original C&C games. It really comes down to how big/fast your upload bandwidth is. Most streaming of video & games is done very quickly, but very poorly. If you took the raw stream and did a good/proper encoding you'd get a 4:1 better compression for almost no loss.

Although the original C&C games were at the lower VGA resolution as I recall, so 320x240 at best, which I would say you could probably play and stream your games with less than 100k upload bandwidth, so even that you shouldn't have any issues with. The difference then comes from if it's full screen or windowed, and if it's windowed I hope you're playing on a screen that you can crank down to 640x480 otherwise it's going to be too small to play.

Anyways, yes you should be able to play those games just fine even with 1 processor.


Keep in mind, people often say 'you could play this on a toaster' yet they forget likely a toaster (or microwave, or washing machine, or fridge...) is likely running a 1Mhz processor that's 4-12bits, and has probably internal memory of 4k or less (Unless it has some fancy graphical UI and touch screen at which point it's a tablet); So it's best not to confuse simple chips and powerful chips even if they are considered old and weak by today's standards.

Thanks for the detailed feedback! I really appreciate the info.

I plan on streaming gameplay to either YouTube or Twitch. Most likely YouTube, since Twitch doesn't like holding onto past broadcasts without purchasing a membership. I'll also add that I won't be running the original versions of Command & Conquer. At least for C&C Gold and Red Alert. I'm using Nyergud's 1.06c patch and cncnet's Red Alert both with all the fancy bells and whistles and high resolution options.

I'm somewhat ashamed of my PC's specs compared to what many others are running, but I still consider myself lucky to own a computer at all. This one might be 8 or so years old, but it can still run a variety of games and perform all sorts of computery tasks lol. Not to mention plenty of games from GOG!

However, my graphics processing power is at a minimum. I have some acceleration from my integrated graphics chip, but little to no 3D processing power. I plan on streaming with an 800x600 resolution for the first few levels of the first two games, then upscaling to 1024x768 and 1360x768 progressively through the game.

My question now is, will I be able to handle streaming or capturing video set in these resolutions with such low GPU specifications? And if you stream at all, do you have any recommendations?

I do have a few free screen capture applications I can utilize. I'll have to check the names of them. I believe one is Ashampoo Snap 7?

My recommendation: Don't.

Increasing the resolution only increases the amount of bitrate required for it to work, and doesn't improve the quality, it will actually degrade it and give you more work for your encoder. Since the C&C games are at fixed resolutions and sprites, all they do is multiply how large 1 block is, which will probably add more artifacting for no gain. If you want a larger resolution to include other things like your own face, chat and other details by all means, but scaling it up isn't going to give you any real benefit otherwise. Players scale very very well usually so you'll get as good quality on lower resolutions than higher for those games. There's a few you can try, while XSplit can offer more... on the spot customizations, it is a paid product and will harp you each time you load it up, plus it has some bugs i've seen where you can't stop the stream without crashing the program sometimes.

OBS on the other hand is fully free and open, and will probably do you just fine.

As for testing. I'd say give it a try either way. You can encode and save to a file and then review your saved stream file. It also has a 'stream test' where it will encode but not send the data, so you can tell if there's dropped frames, check your volume for your microphone, check the general bitrate it's using, etc.

If you don't plan on live streaming but just screen capturing and then posting it later, another option is VirutalDub, which has a capturing feature, but it doesn't have a lot of features for editing, mostly re-encoding, cropping, resizing, adding/cutting clips (of identical data/rates/types together). Although doable to some extent it's not recommended.